Radical centrism, or else!!
The Two Kinds of Moderate
241–250 of 382 posts
Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your entire post is about AOC, who has spent less than two years in office. My statement was about the (non-)events in the democratic party 25-30 and 10-15 years ago. The "AOC as a bogeyman" talking points are a transparent attempt to derail the discussion along the lines the GOP wants. I agree we've seen a shift in the democratic party - not yet in its leadership - in the past 2-4 years (beginning with Sanders, its…
True, the topic of AOC runs through my post, but that's not what it's about . It's about the change in the position of the average/median Democratic politician. And I'd say the change has happened at least somewhat in the Democratic leadership - in many of the presidential candidates, even if not in the House and Senate leadership. And I'd argue that this change was going on before, but you didn't see it, because of…
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Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#243It just can't be the case that this kind of content, which would never ordinarily survive on the front page if written by someone else, has a place here simply because Paul Graham wrote it. I say this as a moderate, of the accidental variety, myself! But if this would get shot down if it appeared in The Atlantic or The New Republic --- and it would, and should --- it shouldn't get a pass just because Harj Taggar and…
Well let's not conflate front-page and "getting shot-down." Something can be both. Also, one reason this is getting shot down less hard than the atlantic is that it's a simple point being made in 10 pages to do so. This thought would be even more viable as a tweet.
The opposite is true: a 10 page inquiry into what it means to be a moderate with citations and sources might not get voted up, but it'd clear the on-topic bar; that's the kind of "intellectually interesting" stuff that is the reason the site doesn't simply ban politics altogether.
Much more importantly though is what the content does to/with the community. Unless there's something truly remarkable about it, political content on HN generates terrible threads. Unlike embedded JIT compilers or linear algebra books, virtually everybody on HN can summon a strong opinion about routine political content, and a huge fraction of those opinions will piss someone else off. It's not a new phenomenon; it's why "politics and religion" is a cliche about what's out of bounds for civilized conversation.
Some political content is worth the thread drama. But this obviously doesn't clear that bar (and, again, I'm not suggesting Paul Graham thinks it does; he didn't submit it).
Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to be careful not to criticize the post on its own terms. Paul Graham should totally write things like this on his own site! It sucks having to be careful about what you because of what other people will do with it, and the weird debates you'll be forced into as a result. I'm just saying, to the extent this post is political, it's political in a totally routine way that doesn't clear the "interestingness" bar…
I don't understand this. if you don't want people to engage with your ideas then don't publish them; there's a very well known medium for this kind of expression/exercise called a private journal. the obviousness of this fact proves that published ideas are intended to be engaged with.
Clearly, posting something to your own site isn't by itself a request to start a debate about it on Hacker News.
Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#245It is so peculiar that anyone believes the United States possesses a "far left" as a force in politics. This requires one to ignore political science and ideology, not to mention the practical politics of the rest of the world, and simply place people on a continuum and draw a line near some perceived median.
Both the moderate left and right are exposed to the extremes of the other side in political echo chambers where strawmen, boogey monsters and real life crazies are presented as the 'far' left and right.
There are plenty of terrible political ideas and actions that die on the vine and they end up collated into messy echo chambers. Mentioning those terrible ideas seems too much for polite company so you have to go looking to find any.
Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#246> the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong Graham's sleights of hand used to be better hidden. The "far left" and "far right" are not fixed points in ideological space (even within a single country).
I agree and I would go even further.
Ideas don't exist in continuous space.
Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#247Ah yes, the old "No one thinks for themselves except people like me" argument. > openly being an accidental moderate requires the most courage of all If he thinks that having middle-of-the-road opinions requires the most courage of them all, he has had an extraordinarily easily life in which he is used to be hailed as brilliant. It seems as though due to his comfortable position in life he has never faced any signifi…
I always assume most people hold moderate viewpoints and the people with extreme viewpoints just tend to be the loudest. At least that seems to be the case with most people I meet anyway.
More important than how loud people are or what viewpoints they publicly claim to have is how they vote. Take a look at who has been getting elected to congress in the US recently: https://xkcd.com/1127/
Now, more than ever in our lifetimes, a lower percentage of congress is moderate. Center-right Republicans (the conservative party) have almost vanished. This isn't about a lack of choice either, because we've seen a bunch of long time incumbent congressmen lose to to people further from the center, like when Republican Bob Bennett finished 3rd in a Utah primary election to 2 far right tea party candidates.
If most people held moderate viewpoints, like you assume, then congress would be getting more moderate, no?
Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#248This is a very American perspective, occasionally a bit flippant (dismissing 100+ years of Marx-influenced intellectuals in politics and economics as “not smart” is definitely not smart, particularly after 2008) and overall mediocre. There is a lot of stereotyping, and it doesn’t account for the interest axis, i.e. the fact that a lot of very smart people simply do not care for organised politics in any way, shape, o…
I don't think 2008 validates Marx. OK, he predicted worsening economic crises. So have a number of others, many of whom are not even close to Marxists. Does 2008 validate them, too? If not, why not? And if 2008 validates such contradictory positions, then being validated by 2008 doesn't mean very much.
The progressive dissociation of financial markets from real economic activity was the primary cause of 2008 - it’s the existence of credit derivatives that made it possible to crash the world economy. That’s very much a marxist prediction come true.
Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this. if you don't want people to engage with your ideas then don't publish them; there's a very well known medium for this kind of expression/exercise called a private journal. the obviousness of this fact proves that published ideas are intended to be engaged with.
Clearly, posting something to your own site isn't by itself a request to start a debate about it on Hacker News.
Sure okay but you do expect someone somewhere to debate you on it. That the forum ends up being hackernews isn't really significant to me visavis your opinion that some published writing could be free from debate.
> It sucks having to be careful about what you because of what other people will do with it, and the weird debates you'll be forced into as a result.
Re: The Two Kinds of Moderate
#250Besides "buying in bulk" there's also a question of "first principles" vs "empirical."
Republican/Democrat is more of "buying in bulk" these days as partisanship has aligned more with polarization.
On the other hand, consider Libertarian/Communist. Those both make policy arguments from first principles. They aren't so much buying policies in bulk as generating policies from a set of axioms. Many "intentional moderates" take it as axiomatic that the truth always lies in the middle, and thus are also generating policies.